“The itsy-bitsty spider went up the water spout. Down came the rain and washed the spider out. Up came the sun and dried up all the rain and the itsty-bitsy spider went up the spout again.”

If so inclined, one could draw comparisons to the mythical tale of Sisyphus, a Greek king banished to Hades, doomed to push a boulder up a hill for all of eternity only to watch it roll down immediately upon reaching the top, or the plight of those in English poet T.S. Eliot’s The Wasteland.

To take things one step further, you could interpret both tales as well as The Itsy-Bitsy Spider as symbols of modern life and the 21st century man in that many of us find ourselves repeating the same actions and mistakes over and over, never experiencing new results yet continuing the process in the hopes of a better outcome. Essentially what Albert Einstein would define as insanity.

Perhaps Vaclav Havel, former president of Czechoslovakia, said it best, “The tragedy of modern man is not that he knows less and less about the meaning of his own life, but that it bothers him less and less.”

Good point, Vaclav. Good point indeed.

Anyways. I always kind of liked spiders. Remember Arachnophobia? That movie was weird.

Burple was a sugar drink from the late ’80s served in a plastic, accordion-esque container. It featured a taste not at all unlike Kool-Aid®. In fact, you may say it was identical to Kool-Aid. I would.

When you were done enjoying the Kool-Aid flavored contents, you could rinse out the container and poke a hole in the lid to turn it into a water gun (instructions were provided) which was pretty neat. Not as neat as a Super Soaker® filled with Burple, though.